Vibeke (Norway)

Vibeke Vedvik had all four children confiscated after she asked Norway’s CPS, Barnevernet for help. The reason she approached ‘social care’ was because her child was struggling to finish his homework. I’ll say it again – she lost her children because ‘not enough homework was being done’.

It often starts like this in Norway, you ask for help and they take your children. They then draw out the court cases and after so many months of manipulating and coercing the children in care, they tell the parents that the children have now attached themselves to the new ‘foster carers’. It’s a sick, sick business in need of a remedy.

Vibeke loves her children so very much and is a wonderful mother with the same challenges that all parents have with raising children. She is one of 1000’s of parents who go through this kind of torture every year in Norway, but this is really the worst kind of torture that Vibeke and her children are going through right now, which would be hard for any one of us to imagine.

She has now got her two daughters back but she can only see her two sons four times a year under supervision in different foster homes.

The CPS recently wrote to Vibeke telling her, that if she doesn’t cause the CPS any trouble, she can keep her daughters and see the boys a little more often without supervision/guards. This is a very popular tactic used by Barnevernet. They take all the children first and then after a while they give you one or two of them back. The victim, in this case Vibeke is half relieved and it gives the CPS some form of security, as they’re effectively saying, play ball with us now, do what we say, and we can make life a little easier for you.

This ‘sickness of silence’ in Norway has to be remedied. Families are being torn apart on a daily basis and so many people still choose to turn a blind eye. Let’s not be like those people, let’s be the solution and let’s pray for Vibeke and her children and the 1000’s of other parents who find themselves in a similar situation, but are too afraid to speak.

As a parent myself, I know exactly what it's like when it comes to homework – and it can, at times be quite challenging for children in different development stages of their lives. Parenting is not any easy job. Someone once said that parenting is as crazy as circumnavigating the globe without a map….but, oh, what a journey! Sadly, in Norway, that journey is often cut short.